382 research outputs found
Moscow, Germany, and the West from Khrushchev to Gorbachev
No full textThe 1990s promise a new era for Europe and for East-West relations, as the two German states, which epitomized the continent's postwar division, move rapidly toward unification. In this authoritative account of Soviet-German relations during the critical decades leading up to this revolutionary development, Michael J. Sodaro provides a comparative analysis of Soviet and East German foreign policy toward West Germany of unparalleled scope and originality.Sodaro begins his story in 1963, with Nikita Khrushchev's abortive attempt to strengthen Moscow's ties with Bonn after years of cold war hostility. The author traces the events surrounding Brezhnev's double-edged policy of seeking a political accommodation and economic cooperation with West Germany while simultaneously building up the USSR's nuclear and conventional arsenals. He pays particular attention to such watershed developments as the Prague Spring, Brandt's Ostpolitik, the FRG's deployment of new U.S.missiles, and Gorbachev 's decision to accept a "zero-zero" solution to the Euromissile controversy. Sodaro concludes with a detailed reconstruction of the radical changes in Soviet policy brought about by Gorbachev, culminating in the dramatic opening of the Berlin wall at the end of 1989 and the sudden collapse of East German communist rule.Drawing on a vast array of Soviet sources, the author explores the complex of perceptions and rationales underlying Soviet actions. Sodaro identifies competing tendencies in Moscow's thinking on Germany and on relations with the United States and Western Europe. He demonstrates that Soviet policy toward Germany was marked by considerable ambivalence through most of the period under investigation, reflecting internal disagreements and richly differentiated elite attitudes.Sodaro considers East German foreign policy with equal thoroughness, focusing on how the tensions that arose in the Soviet-East German relationship affected Soviet and East German policies toward Bonn.Moscow, Germany, and the West from Khrushchev to Gorbachev will be indispensable to anyone seeking to understand the extraordinary changes now unfolding in Soviet attitudes and Germany's national developmen
Alexander chayanov’s theory of peasant farming and personal subsidiary farms in the soviet village (Mid-1930s – 1980s)
No full textThe paper analyzes the possibility of applying the theory of peasant farming by Alexander Chayanov to personal subsidiary farms (LPH) of collective farmers and state farm workers. It is noted that the significant factors affecting their functioning were rural urbanization and the demographic evolution of the rural family, as well as the policy of severe administrative restrictions on individual households. Despite the unfavorable conditions for development, personal part-time farms have demonstrated stability over time. The relations between family size and farm size noted by Chayanov were distorted by a system of repressive taxation, active off-farm employment of farm members, and natural processes of family deformation under the influence of urbanization. The author characterizes why LPH have lost their function of the main source of livelihood. It is concluded that ideological restrictions led to an artificial archaization of production within part-time farms and limited their evolution along the farm route, i.e. the labor-consumer balance in the budget of a rural family was achieved at an extremely low level. On the other hand, it is the spread of non-mechanized manual labor in personal part-time farms that allows the author to largely apply the provi-sions of Chayanov’s theory of peasant farming. © 2021, Permskii Gosudarstvennyi Natsional'nyi Issledovatel'skii Universitet. All rights reserved.Russian Foundation for Basic Research, РФФИ: 18-09-00592 AThe study was supported by a grant from the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (18-09-00592 A) “The evolution of a peasant family in the Middle Urals in the 20th century: the experience of reconstruction based on budget surveys”
"Loans for Shares" Revisited
No full textThe "loans for shares" scheme of 1995-6—in which a handful of well-connected businessmen bought stakes in major Russian companies—is widely considered a scandal that slowed subsequent Russian economic growth. Fifteen years later, I reexamine the details of the program. In light of evidence available today, I concur with the critics that the scheme’s execution appeared corrupt. However, in most other regards the conventional wisdom was wrong. The stakes involved represented a small fraction of the market; the pricing in most cases was in line with international practice; and the scheme can only explain a small part of Russia's increasing wealth inequality. The biggest beneficiaries were not the so-called "oligarchs," but Soviet era industrial managers. After the oligarchs consolidated control, their firms performed far better than comparable state enterprises and companies sold to incumbent managers, and helped fuel Russia’s rapid growth after 1999.
A Discrete Approach for the Inverse Singular Value Problem in Some Quadratic Group
No full textIn this paper the solution of an inverse singular value problem is considered. First the decomposition of a real square matrix A = USigmaV is introduced, where U and V are real square matrices orthogonal with respect to a particular inner product defined through a real diagonal matrix G of order n having all the elements equal to +/-1, and Sigma is a real diagonal matrix with nonnegative elements, called G-singular values. When G is the identity matrix this decomposition is the usual SVD and Sigma is the diagonal matrix of singular values. Given a set {sigma(1),...,sigma(n)} of n real positive numbers we consider the problem to find a real matrix A having them as G-singular values. Neglecting theoretical aspects of the problem, we discuss only an algorithmic issue, trying to apply a Newton type algorithm already considered for the usual inverse singular value problem
Are command economies unstable? Why did the Soviet economy collapse?
No full textThe collapse of the Soviet economy at the end of the 1980s is ascribed to command failure. The likely sources of command failure and economic collapse in the Soviet case are analysed in terms of the payoffs to a dictator who controls the level of coercion and producers who control the level of effort. This approach is used to frame an analytical narrative of the evolution of the Soviet system under Brezhnev and Gorbachev
Applying Stabilization Techniques to Orthogonal Gradient Flows
No full textThe solution of ordinary differential systems on manifolds
could be treated as differential algebraic equation. In this paper we consider
the solution of orthogonal differential systems deriving from the
application of the gradient flow techniques to minimization problems.
Neglecting the constraints for the solution a differential system is derived.
Hence the problem is modified introducing a stabilization technique
which is a function of the constrain. The advantage of this approach
is that it is possible to apply non conservative numerical methods which
are cheaper. Some numerical examples are shown
Preface of the “Fourth Symposium on Physical-chemical Gas-dynamics: Non-equilibrium Processes Modeling and Simulation”
No full text
Finite element simulation of stress evolution in a frictional contact system
No full textA 3-dimensional finite element algorithm for modeling nonlinear frictional contact behaviours between deformable bodies with the node-to-point contact element strategy has been proposed and applied here to investigate stress evolution processes of a nonlinear frictional contact system. The numerical results of a typical intra-plate fault bend model demonstrate the efficiency and usefulness of this algorithm
Images M.S. Gorbachev and B.N. Yeltsin on the pages of the newspaper "zhen-min zhibao"
No full textRussia and China have maintained relations for more than four centuries and throughout its history their relations have repeatedly undergone major changes. At various stages the leaders of the two countries have played a role in shaping bilateral relations. The publication is devoted to defining the role of Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Boris N. Yeltsin in the normalization and development of relations between the USSR / Russia and China. Based on materials from the People’s Daily, an official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, the author identifies the stages of changing the image of Soviet / Russian leaders in the context of the changing geopolitical situation and the conjuncture of bilateral relations. © 2021, Rossiiskaya Akademiya Nauk, Institut Istorii (Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of General Hist. All rights reserved
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